All is Well

The Goldfinch

By Donna Tartt

Theo Decker is grief stricken. He loses his mother, in a bomb blast in a New York museum, and with her he loses that ‘daily, commonplace happiness’ he rarely finds again in his life. But as he loses his mother, he gains a 17th century painting - Carel Fabritius’ The Goldfinch. A dying old man entrusts this painting, saved from the blast, to the thirteen year old’s safekeeping. But Theo, for reasons unknown to even himself (perhaps it is the last remnant of his mother’s life, perhaps he just couldn’t let go of such beauty) keeps it to himself. He moves cities and homes, but the painting accompanies him, occupying a corner of his mind that provides him joy and wonder, even as life around him turns upside down.

Theo carries his painting and his grief with him through a temporary home with his school friend Andy’s family in New York, through Las Vegas where his gambler and alcoholic father takes him, through New York again, this time with Hobie, the dying old man’s business partner in an antique furniture business. There are unforgettable characters in all of these places. Andy’s distant mother, Mrs. Barbour, who gives Theo the closest semblance of parenthood after his mother’s death; his own father, addicted and so completely self-absorbed that even Theo, desperate for a parent figure, can see through every single selfish act of his; and Hobie, a bumbling, giant of a man, living through grief himself, spending his time in his shop’s basement, polishing and restoring lovely pieces of furniture, creating beauty and providing Theo with a career, a home and a desperately missing father-figure. And then there is Boris. Glorious, unfettered Boris, Theo’s only friend in Vegas. Speaking Ukrainian and Russian, drinking vodka and popping pills, Boris takes Theo on a ride from which he finds it hard to get off. You know Boris is that terrible influence that is ultimately going to take Theo down with him. But along with the alcohol and the drugs, Boris gives Theo a taste of friendship he has never known before, and of a life lived careless and free, unafraid. It is an addictive closeness, even a destructive one. But each time you feel Theo falling, life drags him back up. First, out of Vegas on the death of his father, into a saner life with Hobie in New York. And then, with destructive Boris back in his life as a grown man, as you feel Theo’s life spiralling beyond control with a lost painting, gangsters and guns, he is once again resurrected, almost miraculously. At the end, you are left with the feeling that however self-destructive Theo turns, there is a beauty and rightness to life that keeps bringing him back to even keel.

It is a wonderful book. Donna Tartt’s writing is beautiful and evocative -  places, feelings and people come alive (“By contrast Hobie lived and wafted like some great sea mammal in his own mild atmosphere, the dark brown of tea stains and tobacco, where every clock in the house said something different and time didn’t actually correspond to the standard measure but instead meandered along at its own sedate tick-tock, obeying the pace of his antique-crowded backwater, far from the factory-built epoxy-glued version of the world.” or describing Mrs. Barbour “when we looked at each other it seemed that the whole past was redefined and brought into focus by this moment, clear as glass, a complexity of stillness that was rainy afternoons in spring, a dark chair in the hallway, the light-as-air touch of her hand on the back of my head.”). Tartt has created one of those grand narratives - with outsized characters and plots - but which in the end is a hopeful story. A story that says however wicked the world can get, in the end, all will be well.

Heights and Depths

Levels of Life

By Julian Barnes

“You put together two things that have not been put together before. And the world is changed.” That is how the book begins. And the three essays in Barnes’s Levels of Life is a demonstration of how magic can be created by the juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated things.

The first one The Sin of Height is about ballooning in the 19th century - specifically about the pioneer Felix Tournachon (Nadar) who combines his twin passions of ballooning and photography to attempt aerial photography, an attempt that ultimately leads a century later to the Apollo 8 mission’s photograph of the earth from space. While describing Nadar’s experiments and successes, Barnes also points out his touching devotion to his ailing wife. The topic of  love, which is again, in some way a joining of two unrelated beings, is the subject in Barnes’s next essay On the Level.

On the Level is about an imaginary love affair between Sarah Bernhardt, the legendary French actress and the English adventurer and soldier Fred Burnaby. Both are extremely unconventional, bohemian. They fall for each other. And it leads Fred to propose the unthinkable - an actual marriage. He is of course, refused. Sarah Bernhardt explains, “I am constantly in search of new sensations, new emotions….My heart desires more excitement than anyone…any one person… can give.” Fred is heartbroken in a way he has never experienced before; and though he does marry, he carries the hurt until his death in a battle at Khartoum. As Barnes observes in the beginning, “Every love story is a grief story. If not at first, then later. If not for one, then for the other. Sometimes for both.”

And that observation brings us to the third and best essay of all - The Loss of Depth. A deeply personal essay, Barnes writes about his losing his wife after 30 years of marriage. He is grief stricken and he explores the experience of his own grief in the months and years after the death. It proves to be a powerful and incredibly moving exposition on the nature of grief and mourning. For someone who does not believe in an afterlife (“I believe dead is dead.”), there is little to console, little to hope for - “It’s just the universe doing its stuff.” Barnes writes about his anger at friends who skirt the issue of his wife’s death, who are uncomfortable talking about her or his grief with him. He writes about the note his wife left him, a note that in some way consoles him - “The thing is - nature is so exact, it hurts exactly as much as it is worth, so in a way one relishes the pain, I think. If it didn’t matter, it wouldn’t matter.” He writes about contemplating suicide, about planning for it. And about how he gets that thought out of his mind - the awareness that if he was dead, she was even more dead - since she now lived most vividly in his memory. He writes about time not being a great healer - “ Grief is the negative image of love; and if there can be an accumulation of love over the years, then why not of grief?” He writes about the consolation of pain, about almost relishing it - “ Pain shows that you have not forgotten; pain enhances the flavour of memory; pain is a proof of love.” And then “the final tormenting, unanswerable question: what is ‘success’ in mourning? Does it lie in remembering or in forgetting? A staying still or moving on? Or some combination of both?”

The Loss of Depth is gut-wrenching. For anyone who has ever experienced this kind of mind-numbing grief, this is a must read. As it is for anyone who hasn’t. As Barnes himself puts it so succinctly - “Early in life, the world divides crudely into those who have had sex and those who haven’t. Later, into those who have known love, and those who haven’t. Later still - at least, if we are lucky (or, on the other hand, unlucky) - it divides into those who have endured grief, and those who haven’t. These divisions are absolute; they are tropics we cross”

Speed, Revolution and Growing Up

The Flame Throwers 
by Rachel Kushner

The set pieces are wonderful. Reno speeding through the salt pans on her Valera bike, pushing the limits; the blackout in New York and Reno walking the streets observing the darker side of New Yorkers; Rome in revolutionary mode, students protesting against the government and Reno again the observer, watching what it is to be on the other side of privilege.There are more. Descriptive, poetic, alive. It’s the pieces in between that are a bit more problematic.

“Enchantment means to want something and also to know, somewhere inside yourself, not an obvious place, that you aren’t going to get it.” So thinks the 23 year unnamed narrator we only know as Reno, a name given to her because that’s the place she comes from. It’s the seventies and Reno is a very young, impressionable ‘land artist’ - someone who creates art on land, photographing the speed lines her bike makes on salt. She is also ‘enchanted’ - by the New York art world she hopes to enter, by Ronnie and Sandro and Giddle, by all the ‘artists’ she meets, people who call themselves artists by just carrying around a long stick wherever they go, by sticking their vagina into a hole where people can put their fingers into. It’s a strange, insular New York world, described with what one hopes is more irony than fascination. It’s a difficult world a speed addict and artist from the West could hope to enter. And even as Reno enters it, sleeping with and losing her heart and soul to first Ronnie and then Sandro, she is forever conscious of being the outsider, the observer. A bit like Nick in Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty.

She is again the observer in Sandro’s Italian home, of privilege and wealth. Sandro Valera of the Valera motorcycle and tyres fame returns to the home he has run away from, with Reno in tow. Ostensibly to be with Reno as she takes part in a motorcycle race. But the race never happens. Instead Reno is witness to revolution first hand. She is exposed to the privileged world Sandro has pushed himself away from - of dressing for dinner, of swimming pooled houses, of Sandro’s snarky mother and her writer friend, of a brother who is fighting to keep the Valera business and a way of life going in the midst of student protests and left wing violence. And in this privileged world, as Reno experiences betrayal and heartbreak, it sends her fleeing to the other end of the spectrum. She wanders through a Rome in the midst of revolution, gets in with the protesters, even helps one flee the country.

There is a lot more in the book than just Reno. There is the history of the Valera fortune; a back story of Sandro’s father, his love for bikes, the tyre empire he built with slave labour in Brazil, his wartime experiences.But these are almost fillers and we are forever wanting to come back to Reno and her story.

Reno had started off wanting to live experiences. By the end of the book, she has lived through a lifetime of them in a few short months. Yet, there is a remote, almost detached quality to living them. It is as if you never know Reno totally. You see what she goes through vividly, almost as if you are watching a film - the thrill of the speed, the darkness of a blacked-out New York, the chaos of protests in the street. But the heartbreak and betrayal and guilt do not touch you. There is cleverness and poetry in the language, historical authenticity in the plot. But what lives with you are the set pieces. Not the characters, not the emotion. The Flamethrowers is lovely in a way. But it could have been so much more.  

The Summer Book

By Tove Jansson

A remote island, one of many in the Finnish archipelago, is the setting for Tove Jansson’s lovely little The Summer Book. Sophie and her grandmother, inhabit the island in the Scandinavian summer. They spend their hours building Venetian castles, writing a book about angleworms, discussing God, Heaven and Hell, superstitions. They squabble, make up, squabble again.They entertain visitors, take in a cat, worry about storms, swim, take a boat out to another island. The summer seems long and endless but the island is filled with fascinating things to wonder about, work on and watch. “A small island, on the other hand, takes care of itself. It drinks melting snow and spring rain and, finally dew, and if there is a drought, the island waits for the next summer and grows its flowers then instead. The flowers are used to it, and wait quietly in their roots. There’s no need to feel sorry for the flowers, Grandmother said.” The island is a character in itself.

Sophie’s father is around in the background, working, planting flowers not native to the island, bringing in supplies; only someone to  worry about as he goes out in a storm or someone whose warnings about forbidden things are to be ignored. In the background is also Sophie’s mother’s death, an event that is never fully explored, but which tinges everything.

It’s a series of summers, we are never sure how many. We know little of Sophie’s and her grandmother’s lives other than their island days. Yet what we see of them in these summer days on the island affirms the love they have for each other and for the island. It affirms the power of imagination that lets a little girl and an old woman create an entire world on a tiny piece of land surrounded by sea. Death is always there in the background - the grandmother’s impending one or Sophie’s mother’s recent one. It fills the book with a curious sense of sadness. Yet it is a happy book, one that affirms life and beauty and hope, filled with little nuggets of wisdom and common sense. “Sophie asked her grandmother what Heaven looked like, and Grandmother said it might be like the pasture they were just then walking by, on their way to the village over on the mainland.” or “”It’s funny about love,” Sophie said. “The more you love someone, the less they love you back.” “That’s very true,” Grandmother observed.”And so what do you do?” “ You go on loving,” said Sophie threateningly.” You love harder and harder.””

Sophie and her grandmother wind their way into your heart slowly and gradually. Just as the small island does. And you suddenly realize that you have discovered a gem of a book that you wish  you had a child to pass on to.

Transatlantic

By Colum McCann

“When you get up to sit with God or the devil you can curse them both for me. This god-awful manufacture of blood and bone. This fool-soaked war that makes a loneliness of mothers.” The war in question is the Irish conflict. It is a conflict that has been documented well in English literature. Yet it is one that is unfamiliar to me in a very fundamental way - and I have to go back to google to pick up the bits and pieces of that history that McCann litters his Booker-nominated novel with. Which is probably the reason the book does not grab me the way his Let the Great World Spin did.

Lily, Emily, Lotty, Hannah - four generations of women who live through love, loss, pain, loneliness, joy. This is their story, set against the larger political backdrop of Irish (and North American) history. The Irish famine, the civil war in America, the waves of Irish immigration to America, the conflict in Northern Ireland, the peace process… it’s all in there. Through it all, the first non-stop transatlantic flight by Alcock and Brown, an event, like the wire walk in McCann’s Let the Great World Spin, proves to be the pivot to the story.

Lily is the Irish maid, transfixed by Frederick Douglass, the American abolitionist and orator, who makes the tough passage to America. She loses a son in the civil war and two more in an accident. Her daughter Emily is a woman ahead of her times; she has a child out of wedlock, and works as a journalist and writer, making a name for herself in her small community in Newfoundland. Emily and her daughter Lottie are the ones who see off Alcock and Brown on their transatlantic flight, even giving them a letter to deliver to Lily’s saviour in Ireland - a letter that proves historic, as it is one of the few that goes across the Atlantic on that first flight. Lottie returns to Ireland to settle with a Cork linen merchant. But she too cannot escape the sorrow of loss as she loses her only grandchild to the conflict in Ireland. The last section is Hannah’s - Lottie’s daughter as she grows old in Ireland, mourning her son, and trying to cope with the loss of everything she has held dear.

There are long sections where McCann recreates historical moments - Frederick Douglass’s sojourn in Ireland, Alcock and Brown’s actual flight, George Mitchell’s role in the Irish peace process. They are long winded and sometimes distracting, especially for someone like me who is not clued in to the history. Yet McCann’s language has a strange, powerful hold that drags you along these back-and-forths across time and place. And I was forced to finish a book that I was at times willing to give up on.

Transatlantic did not grip me the way Let the Great World Spin did. Yet the story of 4 generations of women does have something to say to you - of how women have always borne the brunt of men’s conflicts, that nothing ultimately can cure the loss of a child, that however hard your grief is to bear, life must and will go on, filled with everyday beauty that one can see if only one is willing to stop and see it.

The Lowland

Jhumpa Lahiri

Grief. It’s the primary emotion underlying the book. Everything is tinged with it - even the most evocative descriptions of beautiful landscapes - warm, marshy Tollygunge in Kolkata in the ‘70s, the harsh yet gorgeous Rhode Island coast. This is my first Jhumpa Lahiri and the emotion doesn’t surprise me. I watched The Namesake and saw the same. 

Subhash and Udayan Mitra are brothers growing up in the Kolkata of the sixties. It’s a middle class childhood spent playing football in the fields beyond the lowland that flooded in the monsoon, sneaking into the exclusive Tollygunge Golf Club in the neighbourhood, spying Bengali actresses outside Technician's studio, working hard at their lessons in school. Subhash, older by a year  is the conventional, timid brother; Udayan the quick and impulsive one. While Subhash is content to let things flow, Udayan questions, prods, pushes. As they move into college, their lives diverge irrevocably.

The Naxalite movement in the ‘70s always had a romantic feel to it. CP Surendran’s Iron Harvest tells it as it was - a doomed uprising, brutally put down by governments in Bengal and Kerala. The Lowland revisits it, in a far more particular, individual manner. As fiery Udayan gets caught up in the ideology, Subhash is content to move away to America, far away from the uncomfortable debate about the rights and wrongs of a movement that is the closest we ever came to a revolution. But Subhash cannot move too far away. The consequences of Udayan’s actions bring him back - to a family forever broken, to a sister-in-law Gauri and an unborn child. And when Subhash tries to repair some of the damage in a way that is more Udayan than Subhash - impulsive, uncaring of repercussions - all their lives are irrevocably changed.

Gauri is complex. She can never stop loving Udayan even if he was a man who risked that love for a belief system. Her grief though is complex - underlying it is her knowledge of the reality of Udayan’s last days and her ambivalence towards his actions. Her consequent actions - towards Subhash and her child Bela - are tinged with this complexity and are quite inexplicable to a world that has prescriptive notions of marriage and motherhood. But to me, she is the heart of the novel. Beautiful, torn, unable to tear herself away from the past, she wanders through Subhash and Bela’s lives as a wound that refuses to heal. 

Subhash, Bela, Gauri - three lives charted by events in Kolkata in the seventies. Jhumpa Lahiri delineates them through exquisite prose that can on occasion bring you to tears. It is a novel that reminds you of the worlds of Anita Brookner, Anne Tyler, even sometimes Arundhati Roy - human stories, individual, particular, minutely observed. I liked Jhumpa Lahiri. I will be reading more of her.

Forbidden Kingdom no more

7 days in Bhutan

Bhutan, the land of the Thundering Dragon, the last Shangri La, the Forbidden Kingdom, the place time forgot. Well, it’s not quite all that in the summer of 2013. There was wireless in almost every hotel and restaurant we went to. The TV had more channels than Tata Sky gives me at home. Mobile phone penetration was nearing 100%. Hindi film songs and the Indian Army were ubiquitous. Jeans and sneakers and Starbucks-style coffee shops seemed the norm in Thimpu.. There is a construction boom as the Bhutanese build newer hotels and homes everywhere. And they are a democracy - that most modern of political theories.

Children in traditional Bhutanese
dress

Yet, people still talked of that quaint term, Gross National Happiness as something real. They wore the traditional gho and kira. They seem to love their kings, especially the one who abdicated - K4, they call him. They still have an amazing 70% of their land under forest  cover. Dzongs and lakhengs continue to be important hang-out joints (as opposed to malls). All the new buildings are still built in the traditional architectural style. And they continue to be an agrarian economy. Nestled in the Himalayas, between 2 giant neighbours, Bhutan is a small jewel that is still making attempts to hold on to some form of cultural authenticity in an increasingly homogenised world.

Hike up the Cheri Goemba

Bhutan is beautiful. Irrespective of the tradition vs modernity debate, it is worth visiting purely for the incredible mountain-scapes and the blue skies, the whitewashed goembas set against the beautiful vistas of green rice fields, the magnificent dzongs on hard-to-climb cliffs and mountain-tops. Visiting it in August meant that we did not sight some famous peaks in the Himalayas. But it meant that we captured some lovely misty and cloudy landscapes, the weather was warm, the greens were lush and abundant. And the prices were off-season.

It’s no point going to Bhutan, if you aren’t willing to exert yourself a bit physically. The best of the country is seen in hikes (and there are enough short ones, for the physically not-so-fit, like me) up to hill tops that afford you incredible views around. Every hill top seems to have a goemba or a dzong. We did a few. One was a hike up to Cheri goemba, Bhutan’s first monastery  - a steep climb with lovely views of the Thimpu valley below. There were horses grazing on the mountain top as we struggled up the last few steps. The warm sun, the white washed goemba

Another hike, another goemba

and the peaceful horses made for a perfect morning. Another was a sweaty hour-long hike up to the large but relatively new

View from Zuri Dzong

(consecrated in 1999) Khamsum Yuelley Namgyal Chorten, dedicated to the 5th King. It has elaborate idols across 3 floors and the rooftop has fabulous views of the Mo Chu and rice fields of the Punakha valley. A third was the hike up to Zuri Dzong, from the Uma Paro. This was a steep one, but Zuri Dzong is pretty and

the views again on the way up and from the Zuri Dzong itself, are lovely. The climb down to the museum and then to Paro Dzong too wasn’t easy… but the views always make the effort worth the while.

The ultimate hike was to the Taktshang Goemba, more popularly known as the Tiger’s Nest Monastery. It is Bhutan’s most famous one, perched almost precariously on a cliff face. The walk up is tough - a steep climb of almost a kilometre, with steps for the last few metres.

The Taktshang Monastery

But there are incredible views of the monastery along the way, making it a superb subject for photography, if you are so inclined. I was worried about the climb - my fitness has always been suspect even in my younger days. But here I was, 43 years old, having never done any serious trekking, but attempting to do a tough hike with little preparation. I had memories of having chickened out of a hike up to Hemkund Sahib lake, opting to ride up on a horse instead. This time, I told myself I would make it on my own two feet. And I did - even if it was with some huffing and puffing. And it was well worth it. Taktshang was burned down twice and re-built - the last time in 2005. You can see the monastery rising up from the cliffs as you negotiate the tough climb… and it prods you to keep going. There is a cafe midway from where the views of the goemba are incredible. And the sight and sound of a waterfall as you near the monastery is breathtaking. Guru Rimpoche was supposed to have flown on a tiger to the monastery, where he meditated in a cave for 3 years. The innumerable legends associated with Taktshang and the difficulty in getting to it, just make it more intriguing and compelling than any other holy place in Bhutan. It was well worth the half day it took to go up and come down.

Pretty rice fields en route to
Chimi Lakhang

There were other dzongs (Paro, Punakha Tashi) and goembas and pretty lakhangs (Kyichu and Chimi). There was the legend of the divine madman Kunley and the penises it inspired - painted on walls and hung on doorways. There was a burnt down dzong near Paro that tourists go to for its

Pretty Punakha Dzong

dramatic ruins. There was that funny animal - the Takin - not quite

The Takin

goat and not quite cow. There was archery practice in Thimpu grounds - with incredibly far away targets. There were handicrafts to buy and the old, traditional Paro town to wander in. There were modern coffee shops in Thimpu with some seriously nice coffee. There was

butter tea that wasn’t quite to my taste. There was a pretty tea house in a nice luxury resort in Paro, where we stayed. And there were even rumours of mysterious midnight knockings at the hotel we stayed in at Punakha.

These are the memories of pretty, quaint, the not-so-forbidden

Tradition and modernity

Bhutan I will carry with me. I am not a big believer in holding onto traditions that are losing their relevance in a modern world. But even I hope that what Bhutan is trying to do - keep their traditional culture relevant and alive, while embracing modernity - is at least partially successful. So that it remains a bulwark against that increasing homogeneity that engulfs most parts of the world today.